Free Chasing the Rainbow by Kade Boehme Page A

right,” Bobby teased.
                  “Anyway,” Jody drawled. “It’s surprisingly as simple as she thought she was pregnant. I didn’t want to be my parents, who shirked most every responsibility ever; so we eloped.”
                  “I remember. It was the scandal of the block.”
                  “I’ve always been good at shocking the Bensonhurst crowd.”
                  “You got that right.” Bobby chuckled.
                  “She ended up not being pregnant.”
                  “Wait. You got married on a piss stick’s say so?”
                  “Something like that,” Jody mumbled. “Anyway, after a few months, I realized I’d done what my parents did, anyway. I’d married someone I didn’t love. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be the man who left. But my dad stuck it out and he was miserable. Their relationship was open—you met DeDe—and they both just always seemed… Like they were looking for something. We moved all over the city, they’d follow trends; they tried to make me in their image. But they weren’t all that bad, honestly.
                  “Then my dad died, about six months into my marriage. I remember he’d died such a miserable man. I guess I didn’t want that. By then I realized I wasn’t just being gentlemanly by not wanting to sleep with my wife. I thought, at first, maybe I’d just been male-deprived since I hadn’t been with a guy in about a year, but around the time she and I separated I realized that… well, I’m totally gay. And I was going to always be only gay no matter how intellectual I wanted to seem and how much more enlightened I’d seem if I called myself demi or pan or label-free like the uber-rich, uber-sensitive types I was friends with in college. I wasn’t cool and artsy with an open mind about sex. I was just a rich gay boy rebelling by being normal. So I just told her that flat out.”
                  Bobby was studying his beer closely. Jody wondered if he sounded like a jerk. He supposed he could see why Bobby would think he was an ass. Even if Bobby had been with Angelina a long time, at least he hadn’t married her, promised her things. Jody couldn’t even excuse himself for being young at the time. He’d been a twenty-four, almost twenty-five year old grad student at the time.
                  “I had cancer.”
                  Jody knew he was staring at Bobby, but Bobby wouldn’t look at him. How could he drop a bomb like that and just not look at Jody.
                  “You had cancer?”
                  “In remission four, almost five years now.”
                  Jody held up a hand, asking for another round of beers.
                  Bobby inhaled loudly. “I was a real son of a bitch to Angie. She knew something was up. Hell, I knew something was up before that. I guess it was just that getting sick made me fucking do something.” Bobby accepted his beer from the bartender and drank more. Jody was too busy studying Bobby’s profile, his scrunched forehead. Wow. Jody had never known anyone who’d had cancer. He couldn’t even imagine having it himself. How scary that must have been. He said so to Bobby.
                  “You can say that again. I thought it was karma at first.” Bobby finally looked at Jody. “Angie and I, when we first got together….”
                  “She was married,” Jody said. He knew the story. Angie was two years older than Bobby, married straight out of high school.
                  “Iz and her big mouth,” Bobby said. But there was no venom behind the words.
                  “It was stupid. We were such kids, then. And it was easy because there were no expectations. I didn’t really consider I might be anything other than straight. I just